A vast amount of content is available to a user via network access, and the amount is ever increasing. For example, users currently have access to billions of web pages via the Internet. Further, the types of content that are available is also increasing, from web pages to images to downloadable music and so on. Therefore, it may be difficult for the users to locate particular content of interest from this amount and types of content
A variety of techniques may be utilized to access and interact with content. For example, a user may access a “search engine” to search web pages. The search engine is typically accessed via a web site address and works as a stand-alone program that maintains a database of information collected over the Internet. For example, the search engine may be used like a card catalog to locate a particular web page of interest by performing text searches, such as to locate a web page having keywords that were provided by a user.
Traditional search engines, however, were configured for the sole purpose of providing an Internet search and thus were typically viewed via sparse web pages that were generally devoid of other content. One technique that was used to promote traffic to the search engine is through configuration as a web portal, such that the web portal acted as a “starting point” by the user for accessing content over the Internet. The web portal, for instance, may include search functionality as well as an output of content, such as news articles and sports scores. Although in some instances this output of content was customizable by the user, the customization caused the user to leave the initial “experience” when interacting with the search engine, such as to navigate from an initial web page to one or more other web pages to select content. Additionally, the initial experience may also be sparse, thereby adversely affecting the user's initial judgment of the search engine and making the customization seem daunting to the user.